13. Steven Spielberg Gives Us Broken Homes And Slack Jaws
Wes Anderson's not the only big name in Hollywood with daddy issues, and he certainly wasn't the first. It'd be a reasonable wager that a good deal of directors have some unresolved parental issues, but the most prominent of these - and the most obvious - has to be Steven Spielberg, who includes an estranged or absent father in every film he can, from Jaws' Chief Brodie (Roy Scheider) and Richard Dreyfus' deranged dad in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can and Tom Cruise's well-meaning deadbeat in War Of The Worlds. Perhaps Spielberg's trying to exorcise feelings of dissatisfaction with his own father, or maybe he's just expressing guilt at abandoning his children to run off and shoot films when he could have spent time with them instead. There are, of course, a number of other significant tropes in Spielberg's films, the most famous of these probably being close-ups of awestruck faces (also known as
"The Spielberg Face") and using music composed by John Williams in nearly every single movie he's ever made. Other telltale signs are broken/breaking marriages, intense streams of light bearing down on characters and close-ups of characters with what they're looking at reflected in the window in front of them.